Chapter 28 #3
The thought came so naturally that Rosalind almost failed to understand what she had just admitted to herself.
The man she loved.
Her hands stilled.
She waited for shock to follow, but there was none. No sudden revelation or bewilderment. Only the strange sense that she had finally given a name to something she had known for far longer than she realized.
Of course she loved William.
Perhaps it had begun in the garden, when he noticed that she was choosing every word before she spoke.
Perhaps it had been in the gallery, when she learned he had quietly reclaimed a painting simply because he understood what it meant to his mother.
Perhaps it had happened beneath the summer sun while they played battledore and Rosalind laughed harder and more freely than she had in weeks.
Or perhaps there had never been one moment at all.
William had simply worked his way into her life piece by piece until she had begun expecting him to be there.
Somewhere along the way, searching for her father had become tangled with garden conversations, ridiculous arguments, shared secrets, and the particular way William could make her laugh when she least wanted to.
Now the thought of a life in which he was suddenly absent from all of it was unbearable.
“He is colder,” Isabella said softly.
Rosalind immediately reached for another blanket and drew it over him, while her father had settled into a chair nearby, watching them with exhausted eyes.
For several minutes, no one spoke. Rosalind sat beside William with his hand held between both of hers, rubbing her thumb over his cold fingers as though she might somehow warm him through determination alone.
“Talk to him,” Edmund said quietly.
She looked at her father.
“He may hear you.”
Rosalind glanced back at William. “What am I supposed to say?”
“Anything.”
Isabella had taken a seat on the opposite side of the bed. For once, she seemed to have no clever remark waiting.
“My mother used to sing when I was frightened,” she said after a moment. “I remember almost none of the songs anymore, but there is one.”
She began hesitantly, her voice so soft that Rosalind had to listen carefully to make out the melody. It was a simple lullaby, the sort meant for dark nurseries and children reluctant to surrender to sleep. Isabella stumbled over one of the verses, paused, and quietly began that part again.
Rosalind closed her eyes and listened.
For the first time since the pistol fired, terror was not the only thing filling the room.
When she looked at William again, his face remained pale against the pillow. A strand of hair had fallen across his forehead, and Rosalind brushed it gently aside.
In the candlelight, she could almost imagine it touched by afternoon sun.
Peach-gold.
Her chest tightened.
She remembered the painting in his mother’s gallery, the rolling countryside beneath that strange bright sky and the path winding through empty fields.
There had been no houses or villages, no destination waiting at the end.
Only a solitary traveler who could continue for as long as he wished without anyone demanding to know where he was going or who he intended to be when he arrived.
He could be anyone.
She had called it an unspeakable freedom.
Rosalind bent closer to William. “Do you remember the painting?”
Isabella continued singing softly behind her as Rosalind stroked her thumb across William’s hand.
“The one in your mother’s gallery with the ridiculous peach sky. You insisted there was nothing ridiculous about it, although I still think I was right.”
A tear slipped down her cheek, but this time she smiled.
“You should go there now. Just for tonight.”
She lifted his hand and pressed her lips against his fingers.
“Go somewhere warm. Somewhere with that ridiculous sky and a path that goes on forever. There are no titles there. No brothers who need saving or fathers who need finding. There is no one waiting for you to become anything at all.”
Her eyes closed, and she pictured the place as clearly as she could. Golden fields rolling toward distant hills, a peach-colored sky stretching endlessly overhead, and one narrow road leading nowhere in particular.
A place where William could simply be William.
“You can be anyone you want there,” she whispered. “You can go anywhere you like.”
Isabella’s lullaby grew softer until it seemed almost part of the quiet surrounding them.
“Go there and rest.”
The words had barely left Rosalind before fear twisted through her.
Rest.
She tightened her fingers around his.
“But you have to come back.” Her voice broke, and she bent until her forehead rested against his hand. “You hear me, William? You may go anywhere you like tonight, but you have to come back to me.”
She pressed his hand against her cheek and closed her eyes.
“I will be there waiting for you. Wherever the path ends.”
Outside, the night stretched endlessly over the Welsh hills, and somewhere beyond Bryn Hir, Gabriel rode for the physician.
No one in the house slept.